


Like the One Who Left Behind His Name

by Septembers_coda



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Apocalypse, Big Brother Dean, Brotherly Angst, Brotherly Love, Depression, Dreams and Nightmares, Drug Use, Dysfunctional Relationships, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Episode: s05e04 The End, Gen, Hallucinations, Heavy Angst, Reverse Big Bang Challenge, Season/Series 05, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-05
Updated: 2016-02-05
Packaged: 2018-05-18 09:38:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,526
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5923600
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Septembers_coda/pseuds/Septembers_coda
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cas dreams of flight, and the fall. Dean dreams of Sam, and of dying. </p><p>A prequel to 5.04, The End.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Like the One Who Left Behind His Name

Cas was dreaming, awake. He spent much of his time in dreams lately. He had started that—drinking, taking the drugs that were strangely easy to acquire in the midst of an apocalypse—to evade memories, to tamp down unanswerable longing. But the dreams had become something else.

The mind of his human vessel, the brain that he had to work with these days, was not designed to hold the dreams of angels, the bone-deep comprehension of flight. Wings. Cas curled around the ache in his middle, constant, pressing, tearing, that was the memory of sky. The worst drugs, the ones Dean had shouted would kill him, back when Dean still noticed he was alive—they could sort of, almost touch and dull that pain. As they did, though, Cas could feel them dissolving the tissues, abrading the life that remained to him, steadily, so he had stopped with those. He was not sure why. He often thought he could have just continued, let them kill him, but there was something left—some tiny flame of hope he could not douse even with a sea of alcohol or endless nights of meaningless sex. The hope lived in these memories.

They were neither his memories, nor Dean’s, but they were both.

He lay now on a high hill above the resistance camps, in a clearing close to the sky. Close, and impossibly far away: he would never reach it, never again. Oh, God. The pain of that, and the beauty.

Geese flew in great, noisy flocks over this place, heading south. What was the apocalypse to them? They followed the patterns in their blood, the urges of their wings and their ancestors. Obeying, as Cas once had. Before he repined, and fell, and he was still falling.

He was stoned, so the wings of the geese who flew low, close enough for his limited human eyes to see clearly, made patterns of color with their movements, sketching cloud shapes below the real clouds above, mocking the sky with their ease there, their right to the wind in their feathers. Their honking cries sounded like the laughter of angels, the ridicule of Castiel’s brothers. Castiel. When that was who he’d been.

He was Cas now: growing cold under the false burn of alcohol and pot, scratched by beard stubble, conscious of his growing stink, beginning to ache from lying on the stony ground. Just Cas, the false guru hippie, passing time at the end of days, remembering when he was something more.

His own self-pity made him sick. Well, it made Dean sick, and Cas felt it. Dean had no use for him anymore. Dean fought on, and would until his last breath. Why couldn’t Cas? He was a born warrior—no, not born, _created_ to be one. Where had that gone when his angelic nature faded away? Did he _have_ a nature anymore?

Nature. The beauty of the geese recaptured him. Their calls echoed with the same strange colorforms their wings created. They called to him to come up into the sky. He closed his eyes, and tried, and dreamed.

It was Michael who had taught him to fly. Oh, of course he was created knowing, but in his dreams he learned, as Dean dreamed of learning to shoot a gun, drive a car, end a monstrous life. Michael was a gruff, impatient teacher, a harsh taskmaster, but harsh out of desperation, because there was love, deepest, terrified love, beneath his militant shouts. Or was that John Winchester?

Had Cas ever been so loved? A young scion of a vast family, he was most conscious of being dutiful and lonely. Having company, laughing, being angry at someone, or disappointed or pleased—these were things he had not known for millennia, until the Winchesters came into his life.

He imagined that he existed because of God’s love, that he had basked in it, believed in it, and obeyed because of it. But God, if he had ever even noticed Cas at all, was long gone. Cas had tried to exist for the Winchester’s love, and that had brought him… here.

He heard the calls of geese long after it was too dark to see them, and fell into sleep at last. The dreams came quickly. 

He was lying in the backseat of the Impala.

“Hey, little brother. You awake?” Lucifer’s tone was warm, friendly—the caring older brother he had once been. Had Cas really known him? He felt it so—felt he knew him better than his next breath, like they knew each other in the darkness before the world’s dawn, before every Fall.

“I’m awake. Where are we?”

“You tell me, buddy. This is your trip. I’m just spelling you behind the wheel for a while.”

Cas sat up and looked around. Brimstone smoked under the wheels; decay and necrosis and every torment of perdition flashed in ugly colors past the windows. Had he really brought them to this place? He knew he had; his many, many failures had. Dread swelled through him, horror and pain and the memory of more pain such as no angel ever felt. No angel. He was no angel…

Lucifer gave him a smile with the fine line of Sam’s lips, reflecting hazel-all-color eyes in the rearview. Cas must save his brother. He must bring him back, make him hear him, turn him from the path to the fall and death and the cage and the burning, burning down the world.

“Stop. Lucifer. Stop the car. We’re… we shouldn’t be here; turn around.”

“Why, brother? Look at this place? Isn’t this exactly where we were headed? Where _you_ were headed all along?”

“No… NO!” The urgency, sudden like an electric shock, surged through Cas and propelled him upright; he dove over the seat and tried to wrestle the wheel from… from…

“SAM!” Cas shouted, and woke to the echo of his own voice on the cold, empty hilltop.

~* * *~

The pain of Sam’s loss reverberated through Cas, worming down into his bones and echoing in the cold earth beneath him. He had long ago given up trying to decide whether it was his own pain or Dean’s. It was the world’s, now. As humanity suffered and bled, Dean remembered Sam, and every moment of their lives together, felt the brutally severed ties of brotherhood every time he closed his eyes, indeed, every time he shouldered a gun, fought a stranger or executed a friend, picked up a drink or laid down a woman.

Cas did all the same things, echoing Dean’s actions without understanding them. He understood the brief refuge of flesh surrounding his, the numbing of alcohol, and the necessity of death, but he did not understand brotherhood.

He had hundreds of brothers, and Dean only one. The only one who mattered, for both of them. Cas had no brother anymore, unless it was Dean, who had no brother and one brother and had lost everything, and so had the world.

Lucifer. Sam.

~* * *~

“God damn it, Cas.” Dean prodded Cas’s prostrate form with his toe. “Get up.”

A soft groan was his only answer, so he kicked Cas a little harder. Fear goaded him to cruelty. Every time someone found Cas like this, Dean was afraid he wouldn’t wake up, and though his own death and that of everyone he knew sat on his chest breathing in his face every day, waiting to take another bite out of his world, it couldn’t happen like _this._

He was angry suddenly. He bent down and grabbed Cas, shaking him hard. “Get up!” he repeated, and dragged Cas into a sitting position before shoving him away in disgust.

“What crawled up your ass?” Cas said dully, rubbing his eyes. He talked like that now. Like some regular asshole, instead of the only link to the divine left in the world. 

“I told you to cut this shit out. I need every soldier.”

Cas laughed bitterly—that was something else he’d never done before; laughing. Dean used to give him a hard time about his humorlessness. Now he hated the stupid, drugged out chuckles more than he’d ever hated the stiff naiveté.

“Every _soldier,”_ Cas murmured. “That’s a good one. Me, a soldier. I used to be a soldier of God.”

“You can still carry a gun, can’t you?”

Cas cursed softly as he rolled to his feet. “Yes, Dean,” he said remotely, and Dean couldn’t identify what was there in his voice. “I can still carry a gun.”

“We need you in the north quarter. Can’t tell who’s infected. You’ll have to go in.”

Cas’s greatest value in the war was that he was immune to Croatoan. He’d been infected a number of times, and Dean had kept the others from putting him down until he proved that the virus worked no change in him at all. Dean worried that the immunity would fail someday, as Cas had gradually grown more human in every other way, but so far it had stuck.

“I will separate the righteous from the wicked, and smite the wicked, all,” Cas answered, swaying on his feet. That _tone._ Dean didn’t know what that was beneath the bitter sarcasm, but he couldn’t afford to care. 

“You still drunk?” Dean grunted, handing him a rifle. 

“No,” Cas answered, taking the gun, promptly dropping it and tripping over it. “I’m _great._ ”

Dean reevaluated as he sniffed the reek surrounding the former angel: drunk was inaccurate, or rather incomplete. Pot smoke clung to Cas’s unwashed clothes and his breath was variably redolent even from several feet away. Dean was silent for a moment, watching Cas try to pick up the gun. Finally he picked it up and handed it to him. Cas stared at him—it was the first time Dean could remember seeing his eyes in months. Red-rimmed and puffy, and still bluer than any Dean had ever seen. He was caught for a long moment in the pain.

Finally Dean looked away. “Truck’s at the bottom of the hill,” he mumbled, turning to walk down the slope. 

Cas did not answer, but he followed.

~* * *~

Cas did what was required. He promised himself a good orgy after this. He hated killing this way. There was no sense of justice, nothing clean in killing with a gun. When he’d smote demons with the power of Heaven, he knew he killed the vessel, too. And he had blinded and killed humans who got too near his true form and never thought a thing of it, but now? Using a machine gun to mow down the pathetic victims of a virus his brother had cursed onto the world… he felt low, and ugly, and the smell of his own fusty sweat that formed from the strain of lifting the heavy gun made him sick, as sick as the carrion and death he left behind.

They’d all been infected. There were no righteous to separate from the wicked. Perhaps there were no righteous left in the world.

Dean waited in the driver’s seat of the truck. He looked at Cas as he walked up.

“All infected. All dead.” Cas threw the gun in the back and got in.

“All?” 

How could there still be hope in Dean’s voice, or disbelief? Cas said nothing, and Dean started the truck.

They drove in silence for ten minutes or so, then the truck rolled to a stop. Cas looked up dully from taking a hit of whiskey from his flask. They were far from camp. Dean had pulled to the side of the road.

“Why are we doing this?” Dean said.

“You tell me. You’re driving.”

“I mean—all of this. Fighting.”

“I know what you meant.”

Dean was silent for a long moment.

“You always did know,” he said. “So why don’t you help me? Why are you killing yourself with drugs? What do I _do_ , Cas? I can’t just… give up. I gave up on Sam, and look what happened.”

“I am helping you, Dean,” Cas said automatically, but he wasn’t. He knew what Dean meant. He wasn’t in it. All he could do was dream of flying, feel the pain and try to numb it, remember brothers, his own and Dean’s. And Sam’s.

“Should I just stop? Stop fighting? I mean, it happened. The apocalypse. Sam’s gone, and I failed. So maybe Michael will win, but I don’t know if he’d be any better than Lucifer, or if there will be anything left of the world by then."

“Dean, look at me.” Cas gestured at himself—ill-dressed, unshaven, unwashed. “Why are you asking me? I’m… _this._ ”

“No worse than the rest of us,” Dean grunted, and Cas realized with a shock that Dean was being _kind,_ expressing… what was this? Caring, sympathy? 

“A lot worse than I used to be.”

Dean just nodded. Cas was relieved that he didn’t fight him, as he had in the beginning, when he’d been angry at Cas all the time, angry at Cas for not wanting to be human, but angry at the loss of his angelic powers too—angry at every decision Cas made or failed to make, and of course Cas should have realized that Dean was really just furious at himself.

Then Dean started to talk. “You know, Sam hated to be dirty when we were kids. Hell, he always did. I knew when something was really wrong, because he stopped being so god damn neat all the time. With the demon blood, you know what twigged me? Other than the late night drives and other obvious shit. It was that he didn’t shave every day, and that his clothes weren’t so clean. Sam only smelled bad when something was wrong.”

“Bet he smells pretty bad now.”

Cas didn’t know why he said it. God, he hated himself sometimes—the fake hippie bullshit, and now this insensitivity! So he was shocked when Dean… _laughed._ Hard, for a long time, and then covered his face when the laughs turned to sobs, and when Cas hesitantly put his hand on his arm, went suddenly still.

“Yeah,” Dean sniffed, shaking himself. “Yeah.” 

He put the truck in gear and drove home.

~* * *~

Dean slept that night, more than a quick nap for the first time in weeks. He dreamt of family. Cas followed him into sleep and down dream roads, his own subconscious blending with Dean’s, and his hand, where he’d touched Dean’s arm that night, and where he’d branded it in the depths of hell, burned. Connected. He’d never told Dean he still felt it. He didn’t know if Dean ever had, if he suspected that it was Cas turning his dreams into angels, into more brothers than Sam.

This was the brand of dream Cas had come to call “white picket fence”. Mary was there, sitting next to John at the kitchen table with her perpetual warm, maternal smile, in a long, flowered yellow dress. Instead of flannel or army khakis, John wore slacks and a sweater of the kind Cas had come to recognize, through Dean’s perception, as nerdy. He wore glasses, too, and his smile was a manly mirror of Mary’s. His hair was well-trimmed and slicked neatly to his head in an anachronistic style.

There was a booster chair next to John. A young Dean, six years old or so, bent and lifted a toddler into it before smiling at his parents. (Had Dean ever really smiled like that?)

“How was school today, son?” asked John in a voice unlike anything Cas would ever associate with him.

“Fine. I got A’s.”

That was a little vague.

“Did you bring the teacher an apple?” asked Mary.

“Yes. A shiny one with lots of RAM.”

Wait a second…

Cas looked at the toddler. He’d avoided looking so far, for good reason. It was Lucifer, wasn’t it? Though they called him Sam and fed him…

“More blood, Sammy?” said John in his weirdly hearty, fifties-accountant-dad voice. He dangled an I.V. bag temptingly in front of the toddler, who grabbed for it. The kitchen rang with the parents’ false, tinny laughter.

But not Dean’s.

“Mom. Dad.” Dean’s voice was serious. “You shouldn’t give him that. Put him down.”

“Why, son?” John now dandled little Sam on his knee while the toddler burbled happily, blood dripping from the corners of his mouth.

Cas flinched at the cocking of a gun. Dean held a pistol steady, pointed directly at his father.

John laughed heartily. “Oho-kay, son, if it’s that important to you,” he said cheerfully, holding up one hand. He set Sam on the floor. Sam gave Dean a bloody grin—Cas’s mind flashed to adult Sam—and began toddling unsteadily across the floor toward Dean with his arms outstretched.

The house burst into flames where Sam stepped. John and Mary turned to ash in their chairs as he passed them. Cas shouted, a helpless, voiceless spectator. Dean gripped the gun tightly in his now-adult-hands. He pointed it at his brother’s bloody smile. His hand shook and shook as he did not shoot.

He crumpled to the flaming floor, among a reek of brimstone, and turned the gun on himself.

~* * *~

Cas woke with a shout. He sat up in bed, sweating and trembling, stone sober for once. The memory of the dream was so clear that he was suddenly sure it was more than a dream.

Heart in his mouth, he shoved on shoes and rushed to Dean’s cabin. It was pre-dawn, but a light shone in the window. Cas smelled gunpowder, and he burst through the door without knocking.

Dean looked up, barely moving. He sat in a chair in the middle of the room with a rifle across his lap. Cas stared at him for a long moment before moving slowly to sit on the bed.

Only a small corner of it was available for sitting; the bed, and the rest of the room, was covered with weapons in various states of assembly. Bullets, bullet-molds, and cleaning paraphernalia were scattered among them, which explained the gunpowder smell.

“I never do it,” Dean said, conversationally. “I just think about it sometimes.”

“Why?” asked Cas. Though he knew.

“Escape hatch. It helps me sleep.” He grunted, gesturing down at the gun, perfectly polished, cocked and loaded, across his lap. “Fell asleep like this.”

“And dreamt of Sam,” Cas said.

“Well, yeah. Usually do. How’d you know?”

He asked without much curiosity, and Cas did not answer. He had no words for this moment. Dean was no more lost than he himself—perhaps less so. Dean still had a purpose, even if he no longer believed he would achieve it.

“I could never have killed him, you know,” Dean said. “I know Dad thought about it, and he couldn’t either. I never knew what it was about. I was too little, but now I get it, how I would sometimes wake up, and he’d be sitting just like this, with a gun in his lap, watching Sam sleep. I… thought it was because Sam was younger, needed more protection. Sometimes I got jealous and thought it was because he loved Sam more. Maybe he did, I dunno. God knows I did. We both loved him, and the world paid the price.” 

Dean barely moved as he spoke, fingers stroking the barrel of the gun. “I wished it was me. I wish… I had been the second born. Maybe then I would’ve had the guts to do what was necessary.” His voice was almost a whisper now. “Myself, I could do without. I could never do without Sam.”

“I wish I was still an angel. Not just… because.” _So I could fly. So I could understand. So I could fight. So I could believe._ “So I could help you. I can’t stand it like this.”

“The last time I tried to kill myself, you beat the living shit out of me and dragged me back to Bobby’s.”

For some ridiculous, utterly incomprehensible reason, they both began to laugh, and once started, they could not stop. Tears streamed down Dean’s face as the laughter faded. “I wish Bobby was still here for you to drag me to him.”

“Me, too. And Sam.”

“And Sam. More than anything,” Dean said, peering casually down the barrel of the gun. “Know what he’d say if he were here?”

“What?”

“He’d say to stop feeling sorry for myself, and to get up and fight. Just what I always said to him, because I am one smart son of a bitch.” He clicked the safety on the gun and tossed it on the bed.

Cas wasn’t listening. He stood up, gazing through a crack in Dean’s curtains toward the east, where he could feel the sun about to rise.

He turned back toward Dean, and Dean felt a strange thrill of memory and power. Cas looked… like an angel.

“Someone is coming,” Cas said in his old, flat monotone.

Dean stood, grabbing a gun from the bed. “What? Who?”

Cas stared for another long moment. He turned slowly, finally raising divine-blue eyes to Dean’s.

“You,” he said.

The End 

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was written for the 2015-2016 [ Supernatural Reverse Bang ](http://spn-reversebang.livejournal.com/) challenge on LJ and inspired by jaelijn’s magnificent art. See [her art masterpost here](http://jaelijn.livejournal.com/82050.html) and tell her how beautiful it is.
> 
> I also found a lot of inspiration in the brilliant Supernatural fanworks of [ brightly_lit.](http://archiveofourown.org/users/brightly_lit/pseuds/brightly_lit%20)
> 
> The fic’s title was drawn from the haunting, gorgeous Jeff Buckley song _[Dream Brother.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNPaKr6qzYg%20) _ If Buckley hadn’t died years before the pilot, I would fervently believe he wrote this song about Supernatural.


End file.
